Obama's roots in the White working-class run deep
Dinesh Sharma/Contributing Commentator
Issue date: 6/1/08 Section: Barack Obama
Each of us carries within us idealized images and voices of our parents and grandparents. All good reformers while appealing to the masses reinforce our belief in the earlier generations. Only a few have the uncanny ability to tune into the 'little voice' of the masses and overcome the politics of difference across race, gender, religion and class. Gandhi had this gift, according to historians and biographers. Obama displays many characteristics of a first-rate reformer whose life story exemplifies why the 'tired and hungry masses yearning to be free' still flock to America. He inspires the You-Tube generation and those disengaged from the political process, yet continues to alienate a segment of the working class White men and women, a generation of folks best represented by his late mother and his grandparents.
A closer look at young Barry's (his childhood name) multicultural upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia indicates that his late mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, an idealistic single mother from Kansas and an only child of a depression era parents who was named after her father, had a big hand in shaping the budding personality of this would be president. While Obama may have inherited his Kenyan father's oratory skills, who abandoned him at the tender age of two to attend Harvard before returning to his homeland, it was his mother who gave him the gift of language and tutored him English for fours hours in the morning before sending him off to school.
In the latest edition of his memoir, Obama reflects on the passing of his mother, 'I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book -- less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life...I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.' It is somewhat ironic that he finds himself in a political stalemate against a woman senator 5 years younger than his mother, who also grew up in the Midwest and came of age on the same idealism of the 60's.
A closer look at young Barry's (his childhood name) multicultural upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia indicates that his late mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, an idealistic single mother from Kansas and an only child of a depression era parents who was named after her father, had a big hand in shaping the budding personality of this would be president. While Obama may have inherited his Kenyan father's oratory skills, who abandoned him at the tender age of two to attend Harvard before returning to his homeland, it was his mother who gave him the gift of language and tutored him English for fours hours in the morning before sending him off to school.
In the latest edition of his memoir, Obama reflects on the passing of his mother, 'I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book -- less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life...I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.' It is somewhat ironic that he finds himself in a political stalemate against a woman senator 5 years younger than his mother, who also grew up in the Midwest and came of age on the same idealism of the 60's.
Be the first to comment on this story